That puts Xojo, PowerBasic, VB6, etc. also in this…
PC Soft has a long history. And it is a professional company.
You’re not wrong. It’s kind of an interesting question. There’s a product called WiseJ.NET that looks to have substantial backing and a very active development effort, that takes WinForms apps with minimal changes and allows them to be deployed via the web.
Strictly speaking there are no indications that it’s wobbly, quite the opposite. I was considering using it for awhile for a particular project that ended up falling through. Still, it’s incredibly ambitious particularly to support .NET Core because, among other things, the WInForms designer still runs on .NET Framework in a virtual environment of some sort within Visual Studio (which explains why it’s so damn slow sometimes with a complex form). And they do that for reasons such as, it depends on BinaryFormatter and they are trying to deprecate BinaryFormatter for security reasons.
So you have MSFT shimming up WinForms to keep working acceptably with current versions of Visual Studio without them investing much in retiring technical debt, and then you have WiseJ.NET shimming up the shims to make it all work with web deployment, creating a whole library of control wrappers so that most WinForms control libraries will still work (more shims) and it makes me nervous.
Because all it would take for this to implode would be for MSFT to do something (intentionally or not) that breaks WiseJ.NET’s assumptions or paradigms and causes a bunch of work for them just to keep things functioning, or limits users to not go beyond .NET version x or something, causing irritation / frustration and impeding progress and the steady march of new features and amenities that keep any platform going, and pretty soon, comes a press release saying that with regret effective in 6 months they are hanging it up.
I already had this happen to me in fact with a predecessor effort to WiseJ (forget the name offhand) where the Israeli company suddenly changed tack and dropped the whole thing as Too Much Work and I had to come up with something else for an internal tool I had developed.
So I do tend to feel that .NET Maui or Avalon or Uno, or the rough equivalents in the Java ecosystem, are probably safer long-term bets.
The other side of that argument is that not even .NET Maui is invulnerable. I’ve been at this for over 40 years and many times MSFT has decided that technology X that was lauded as the Second Coming 5 years previously is unceremoniously put on life support in favor of technology Y. The canonical example that always comes to mind is .NET Remoting vs WCF vs this vs that vs the other thing. You get a code base committed to something along that timeline and then you find yourself with the Hobson’s choice to go out on a limb (“if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”) and risk some obscure show stopping error forcing you to change technologies down the road, vs, well, fixing something that ain’t broke.
But I guess that is just the haps in the development world, there’s no really good answer to a perfect balance between a platform staying “relevant” and “popular” and compatible with all the latest fads and being stable for existing software. Increasingly, one must plan for a complete rewrite at not less than 10 year intervals I guess.
Like I said before: look on the pricing and start to think. It is really expensive. And a black box. Using Java you have also your entire IDE open sourced (IntelliJ CE, Netbeans, Eclipse, even VScode). I don’t like to use black boxes.
Using it the next problem is: what is when and if they stop their product? Did you loose your project code then? I mean: programming Java I can think about Oracle stopping Java Support. Can be. But even if THEY stop Java there is a really big community of Java Developers for JDK development. The structure will further develop Java at that point. Hence it is open source there’s no problem.
Deciding for a toolchain is deciding what happens with your code now and in ten years. As far as I can say my Java Code will run for the next ten years under nearly all circumstances. There is no scenario that will not be so. Also C# Code will run in a decade mostly.
But small third parties serving a development system with own language or completely own implementations containing a risk: that they stop existing. And that stops it immediately.
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The majority of programmers have no use for the IDE source code. I personally don’t use IDE at all, just a simple text editor.
There are commercial tools that are almost as old as I am, like Visual Prolog that started as Turbo Prolog 40 years ago.
I am happy using 8th and I could always choose to write NDA and buy access to source code.
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This is why turning from Xojo to another proprietary vendor isn’t a wise choice. it leads in the same trap somewhen.
ya know, this experience, the last six months, first with livecode going nuts on the pricing, and then 4d doing the same, really made me start looking.
i just started messing with flutterflow. flutterflow is a RAD/4GL tool that writes flutter/dart code. it makes me wonder if i should just be looking this type of tool.
it’s one of the things that makes me worry less about valentina. even though the tool is proprietary, it works on sqlite/odbc/postgres db’s.
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ah forgot to mention.
if something has a crap website, ignore it! for 20 years that’s a good heuristic.
below just a screenshot with all the crap this website needs to be shown…
It is aalways the problem they have. Flutterflow sounds great for mobile apps. or not? Something nobody knows. But, like always, use what you are able to work all you stuff out with. So, I will still further use Java. And for mobile: Java/codenameone or, if native is needed from which reason ever: I will write it native. That’s it
so, you’re complaining about the product because you don’t like their website?
that reminds me, i wonder what they used to build that site.
I use DBeaver
Works on databases I’ve never even heard of
And its free
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yes I do exactly this! Cause it gives you glimpse about how a Company, a Project is thinking about Responsibility, Security, Privacy and 3rd Party Dependencies and good Website/Software Design and in what degree marketing bullshitters have taken over.
It is a very good heuristic.
In this specific case, it seems to me they are completly unaware of all this.
I don’t see that but I can see that it is a dagerous product while nobody knows what will go on within the next few months. If they stop Service it ends abrupt. Worse than X…o. But for many people it counts more that it looks good from beginning. Again the mantra: write in a language which is open sourced with tools which are open sourced. It reduces the riscs. And at the moment you need native stuffs or more native like stuffs: write native. It is not that complex. Why people are searching always XPLAT? I have no Idea. Running your Software XPLAT makes only sense if it can really run XPLAT. Here you get a Software which will run XLAT as long as the vendor invests money. Dangerous story.
Remember FlutterFlow is not opensource and if the company goes the tool also goes. And the code it generates is not easy to edit manually. Maintaining it would prove to be nightmare at best.
My personal experience of recreating an app for web and mobile is good.
It removes lots of hassle when it comes to building iOS apps.
But the web app is slow to load as it has to first download a big library before the app starts.
XPlatform is necessary for us as we need to build complex apps that run on multiple mobile platforms without having to maintain them in two different languages, dev tools, etc. For us building a mobile app that works on Windows Mobile, iOS, Android is a must and we are not ready to maintain two different code bases or maintain a list of bugs separately for both platforms or provide un-propotional features like is mostly the case when a software is ported to other platforms (as an after thought) after it is built and becomes stable on one platform and this also forces one to maintain separate lists of features for different platforms.
Currently we have two developer who build variety of apps for the mobile platforms mentioned earlier. This help in cutting cost as well as speeding the release cycles and managing bug fixing.
The cost for 3 targets is justifiable especially when we compare it to Xojo where one has to shell out for all the third party libraries that one has to use to achieve what WinDev gives built in.
The code of WinDev only is just $1200 + tax with competitive exchange.
https://windev.com/pcsoft/competitive-exchange.htm
We are using it for more than a decade now without any serious issues except the IDE crashes sometimes but fortunately its auto recovery feature is powerful and we rarely lose any of our hard work!
One feature I love the most is Automatic testing of the application. It makes it easy for us to identify any performance bottlenecks.
right. it’s a tool, but it’s better than being 100% stuck in an ecosystem that can hold your apps hostage.
i have only started messing with it. so far, the code and the libraries were simple enough to dive into. they don’t look that different than any of the other dart/flutter packages i have downloaded.
i ran into an issue with FF, over the weekend, with a form i was building. now i’m stopped, waiting for support. since then, i was able to completely rebuild the screens i had built in FF, using vanilla flutter, with the help of an AI agent. i was also able to add some additional features that aren’t included with FF out of the box.
adding third-party pacakges to FF was difficult. adding custom code was also difficult, forcing me to drop into VSC to debug them, before uploading the code, again to FF. all FF told me was there was a problem compiling the code, or that the code compiled, cleanly.
i’m going to keep on trucking with vanilla flutter and see how much i get done before i hear from FF support. if i don’t hear from them, soon, the app will be done, and FF will be moot. it is maybe likely that i have gotten to that place that everyone eventually gets to with low/no code tools: you outgrow it, and it becomes more of a hindrance than a help. i thought that maybe with FF, things would be different, because i should not be as constrained by the tool. we’ll see.
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Chances of getting support is very remote. In one case I posted a query and got reply after 4 months.
But by that time I have switched to Blup and completed the project in it.
they responded, but the response was unhelpful.
trial cancelled.
i made more progress building by hand, with copilot autocomplete than i did with FF.
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